Scheduled Recording of Broadcast Radio

In the day when I had a 45 minute commute to work and a car that had horrible FM reception, I set up my linux server to record broadcast radio and convert it to mp3 in realtime. In the morning, before I left, I'd sync the data to my iPod to listen to in the car using a cassette adapter and the car speakers.

I now live 5 minutes from work, and have decent FM reception. Because I no longer use this system, I never got around to documenting it. The project was mostly made possible with mpegrec, lame, cron, and a bunch of homemade scripts to tie it all together.

Better solutions may have become available since I last worked on this.

Here's an example script that sets the volume, runs mpegrec. See mpegrec man page for what the options mean.

#!/bin/sh

/usr/bin/rexima line rec vol 60 pcm 60 line 60 mic 60 igain 60

/usr/local/bin/mpegrec \
-l 7190 \
-b 64 \
-x '-m m -V 9 --ta "Morning Edition" --tl "Morning Edition" --ty "2002"' \
-o /path/morning_edition_`date +%m-%d-%y`.mp3 \
2>/path/errors >/dev/null

Resources

mpegrec - encode to mp3 from line-in

Time Shifiting FM Radio - Using D-Link DSB-R100 FM Radio and RedHat 8.0 Linux.

Time Shifting FM Radio - Using D-Link Radio and Mac OS X.

Radio YourWay - A standalone device that can record am/fm radio broadcast.

Last updated: 01/06/2004